11 Ultimate Tips That Will Make Your Website User-Friendly

Websites bring business closer to customers. In the modern competitive world, selling products or services and converting people into loyal customers is difficult without putting a business on the web. However, a website must be user-friendly in many ways if it needs to build a solid customer base.

The importance of websites for business is now a well-established fact. But not all websites are user-friendly. Most sites lose their valuable visitors in a few seconds after they visit such their web pages. They find many obstacles when surfing the information from these web pages. So, without wasting their time, the visitors migrate to the other sites for better user experience.

A user-friendly website is mainly about giving the user a pleasant experience when the web pages are scanned for the information. A glitch-free website should be the aim while designing its web pages.

When talking about great user experience, it means a combination of uniqueness, aesthetics, quick load time, etc. With such a site, you can expect the clients coming back for more updated information. This is because the site is capable of retaining its users and readers. Many of them will be your loyal customers ultimately.

Overall, the idea behind making a website more accessible to scan is that users hang around for more time. The more time they spend reading or watching your content, the more they will engage with your brand. So, how you should design your website that visitors can scan it easily?

Here Are 11 Ultimate Tips That Will Make Your Website User-Friendly

01. Build A Simple Navigation Scheme

Navigation is perhaps the most critical aspect of a user-friendly website. The users must find the information they seek in an instant. They should be navigating through your web pages effortlessly. If they have to pause to look for the buttons and links to take them to the desired information, then redesign the navigational system.

Check your web page design for the common navigational mistakes. Make it sure that users find the navigational features at a glance. The menu bars must be instantly visible. If there are some old acronyms in the navigational menu, remove them. You may think that the abbreviations and acronyms will get noticed, but this isn’t the case.

Remove the multiple layers, if any, from the navigational menu. Many sites have layers of sub-menus. That is a terrible user experience. The users should not be going through many such layers before they access the information.

Having a search box is essential for the site as it offers tremendous navigational features. Users just need to type some keyword in the box to get the details without going to the other pages manually.

You can design the standard navigation features such as ‘’home”, ‘’about”, ‘’contact”, etc. at the top of your website. The visitors can see the buttons quickly at the top.

There is no end to improving the menu and make it look unique. Just use your imagination and put yourself in place of your visitors. Then, come out with creative navigational features that are simple and easy to use.

Looking for a website design?

We have helped thousands of business owners from all around the world with their graphic design needs such as a logo design, website design, social media posts, banner and much more.Get Website DesignGet a free quote

02. Make The Information Readable

You surely have a lot of useful information to deliver. But if readers cannot grasp it quickly, you are losing them. Several studies have shown that people do not thoroughly read a web page. Instead, they scan the pages rapidly. Therefore, your website should be scannable.

But what does scanning means here? If there are big paragraphs, the users will find it difficult to read the entire blog or any piece of content. They will ultimately leave the page half-read. But if you present the information in small paragraphs of two to three lines, it will catch the eye quickly. This is the reason that many web pages today even have single lines after a few paragraphs of two to three lines.

Also, to make a website readable, ensure some contrast between the colors. The background color should be different from the color for the text. This tactic will help in reading the text easily.

The use of font also matters a lot. Most experts recommend san serif fonts for online reading while serif fonts are better for print design. The fonts should be simple. But avoid using too many of them on the same page.

Formatting is another aspect of readability when designing your website. You can use formatting techniques such as bulleted lists, headlines, highlighting of words and sentences, etc. Your readers can get the most critical detail quickly this way. Make sure that there are no long chunks of unbroken text on the pages.

03. Ensure Quick Loading

A significant factor in determining the success of a website is the load time. When people click on your site’s link, the site must be visible instantly. If it takes more time to load, users will leave. Studies have revealed that people leave a website if it takes more than ten seconds to load as the user’s attention span is fast decreasing.

For having a quick loading site, remove all those additional elements that are no longer in use. Too many videos and other multimedia will slow down your site. Many websites have additional elements that make the site pages heavy to load which are a hurdle in creating a user-friendly site.

Another effective way to increase your site’s load time is to compress your codes. To do so, download some zipping software such as Gzip. Then, compress all the files together. This way, you can reduce the HTTP responses. Remember that more HTTP responses result in more traffic to the server, which slows down a website.

04. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

People use mobile devices for searching information over the internet. So, it becomes essential for you to find out how your business website appears and how users navigate it on mobile devices. Today, a user-friendly website is one which is mobile-friendly as well. The design must be responsive.

Remember that your navigational scheme will be different for mobile devices than for a desktop website. You have to put the buttons in such a way that they can be tapped easily by fingers on the small screen.

Also, your responsive design layout should be able to create optimized images. This way, you can get rid of the bandwidth and scaling issues. Prefer using GIF, PNG-8, and JPEG formats. With these measures in place, you can hope to build a true brand identity that helps in the steady growth of your business.

05.Prefer One Color Scheme

Prefer the use of one color rather than multiple colors in your web pages. The use of one color will also ensure brand consistency as people can immediately identify your company as genuine. Multiple colors leave a confusing message many times for the users.

However, choose a color that best defines and represents your business. Make sure that the colors your logo designer uses are already present in your other marketing materials.

06. Make Good Use Of White Space

To ensure better user-friendly website, distribute various elements such as text and images judiciously. An effective way to ensure it is to consider white space. White space is the one vacant between the two components.

A carefully left white space between two elements gives relief to the reader’s eye. This helps in keeping a visitor on your website for a more extended period. The site page will look crowded and congested for want of the space, making the page less legible. But due to the sufficient space, the readers can focus on the surrounding titles and text.

Studies have shown that if there is a lot of white space around titles and texts, the user attention goes up by 20%. There is some feeling of openness and freshness if the page has adequate space.

However, keep a balance as too much of white space can result in too less information. So, strike a balance by putting the most critical information at the top. To highlight the text or images at the top, leave some space around them.

07. Test Your Website On Different Browsers

While your website is working well on Google, you should test the site on the other browsers. Many of your potential customers use a host of browsers other than Google. So, check how your website looks on all the browsers. It should look equally impressive on every browser.

So, do not be satisfied with checking your website’s functionality on Chrome only. Instead, test it also on Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, etc. Also, check the appearance of the site on mobile devices to find out how it looks and functions on Apple and Android.

As you test the site, you may come across some hurdles such as the site not loading properly due to Flash when you run on mobile devices. In that case, redesign the website specifically for mobile access.

08. Display Your Social Icons

People want to share useful and exciting information. If there are no social media icons on your web pages, they will find the site less useful.

These icons allow for sharing of the information right from the site. So, it is not just enough to have a dedicated social media page, but have all the icons such as Twitter and Facebook at the right places on the website as well.

09. Ensure Enticing Call-To-Actions

A clear call-to-action is also essential to make your site user-friendly. While it seems evident that your visitors will find the CTC buttons, it would be good to make the enticing so that they are encouraged to click. You should not leave your visitors wondering what action to take on a particular page.

Ensure that your website designer makes the call-to-action clickable on every page so that it drives visitors. Some of the attractive call-to-action buttons with text include – Download Now, Click Here to Order, Learn More, Get x product free, Contact Us.

10. Incorporate Chat Functionality

Your potential clients would like to have a live chat with your company’s office to find out more about your products or services. There is no alternative to a one-to-one chat that gives some insight to the visitors about what you offer.

They may have several questions regarding your services or products. Many of them do not want to call. But you can engage and encourage them to talk to you through the chat functionality on your website.

11. Enable Content Caching

Instead of restricting your content for access to one particular geographical region, you would want it to spread across the globe. That is the way to drive customers from the world over. This is known as content caching. A better way to achieve this is to use a CDN tool. This tool is useful for storing your website’s data and then for blasting the data around the world.

For example, if your business is located somewhere in the USA, you may be planning to take it to your audience in Europe and Asia. The CDN tool functions by caching your entire data of website, and then it distributes it to the servers across the world. This way, your audience can have a great user experience.

Thus, your visitors from Asia or Europe or elsewhere do not need to request for accessing your website from your US server. This means that besides designers doing great graphic design jobs on your website, content caching is also equally important for making the site user-friendly.

So, these are the key considerations for making your website user-friendly. Although there many more factors that need to be considered, but these are the basics to start with. As your site grows, there may be hurdles in its way. You will be steadily removing them one by one to keep the site updated for better user experience.

You can get a great design of your website that users will find easier to navigate from a leading marketplace Designhill. Launch your design contest at this marketplace and get dozens of new ideas from as many designers.

Are You Looking for a New Graphic Designer?If Yes, Call Us on +1 (888) 765-2908 [times for calling 9am to 6pm EST (US)] or Register for a Free Design Consultation

Conclusion

To make your website user-friendly, ensure that its navigational scheme is simple and the information is readable. The site should be mobile-friendly. It should load quickly, and its color scheme and call-to-action should be enticing. Design social icons for easy sharing of content. Allow users to chat with your company from the site.

I'm a blogger and designer and I work as a creative head for Designhill. I write on topics concerning design, ecommerce, startups, digital marketing, interactive content. My creative work has earned me several laurels over the years.
Facebook | Twitter | Google+

Likes

Who we are

Designhill is a graphic design platform for designers to earn, participate, work and share their work and is a one point stop for business owners to source high quality designs including logos, website design and more at affordable prices.